Electrical connectors are used in a variety of applications wherein an electrical cable, including a plurality of conductors, is terminated to a plurality of terminals in the connector housing. Once the cable is terminated to the housing, there is a tendency to grab onto or hold the connector by means of the cable itself, or even to disconnect the connector by pulling on the cable. Such actions can cause the conductors of the cable to be pulled out of their respective terminals or actually pull the terminals out of the connector housing. Consequently, electrical connectors often have some form of strain relief means for clamping onto the cable so that forces from the cable are transmitted to the strain relief means and, in turn, to the connector housing rather than being transmitted to the terminals terminated to the conductors of the cable.
A typical application of such a system is in automotive assembly line operations wherein bundled wire assemblies are managed as single bundled units. A bundled wire unit may be terminated to a connector to define a wiring harness. The managing and handling of this wiring harness during assembly is often manual and done by way of grabbing the bundle of wires. Therefore, the connectors terminated to the wire bundles are provided with strain reliefs to ensure that when the wires are pulled or handled, the resulting tensile forces are transmitted from the wires through the strain relief means to the housing and not to the terminals.
Known strain relief members have been molded integrally with the connector housing or cover to reduce the number of components associated with the connector assembly. However, integrally molded strain relief members have presented various problems. For instance, one problem associated with integrally molded strain relief members is due to the fact that in some applications, such as in automotive assembly applications, the wire bundles are held to the strain relief members by cable wraps, tape, cable ties or the like. If a particular wire or terminal must be reworked within the connector housing, the entire wire bundle must be unwrapped and untaped from the strain relief member in order to access the particular wire or terminal. After reworking, the entire wire bundle must be reassembled and retaped to the integral strain relief member of the housing. This procedure can be costly in terms of time and labor.
Another problem associated with integrally molded strain relief members is that connector designs often are developed for particular customer applications which have specific configurations that route the wire bundles. While the connector itself may mate with a complementary connector in a given orientation, the wire bundles may have to exit the connector in a particular direction. These varying configurations require that the integral strain relief member be molded in a particular shape or configuration to ensure the customized routing of the wire bundle. These varying configurations and applications necessitate different strain relief and housing designs for each different orientation or location of the strain relief. This is very costly in terms of mold expenses, design time and inventory requirements. Even if a separate strain relief member is provided independent of the connector housing, various design specifications require the strain relief member to be positioned at different locations on the housing and a multiplicity of different housing configurations and resulting mold and inventory costs are incurred.
The present invention is directed to solving these various problems in an electrical connector having a strain relief system for an electrical cable.